Certifiable

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

David McGimpsey is a funny man, and Certifiable is a wonky collection of
stories, tall tales, and oddball university course descriptions that
will tickle any reader’s funny bone. The shortest piece, “If F.
Scott Fitzgerald,” which is one sentence, provides a sly entry to the
McGimpsey imagination: “If F. Scott Fitzgerald was alive today one of
the things I’m sure he would say (besides “wow! Flavored-odka!”)
is that people without cable TV, they are different from you and me.”
The longest, “Road Porn,” is an endearing story of brotherly love in
which the “porn” part is only a bunch of DVDs in a car trunk.

From “The Secret Correspondence Between Fonzie’s Jacket and
Christina Aguilera” and “The Gospel According to St. Matthew
Introduced by Batman,” to stories about a trial lost to Matlock and a
university course on Elvis, McGimpsey can find ways to twist the mundane
out of whack. He has a fine, wide-ranging sense of popular culture and
of U.S. cultural hegemony in the early 2000s. Most of these stories have
an “I” who’s just not quite in sync with the normal world, but
he’s always a chummy sort who’s fun to hear from.

Certifiable has much cultural comedy to offer, but these stories are
probably best taken in small doses. Nevertheless, it’s an entertaining
collection by a writer who is all too aware of exactly what he’s on
about.